BOOKS AND WRITERS
SAINTSBURY left directions in his will that there should be no biography of him, and that his letters should not be pub- lished. About his letters I think he judged wisely. I should be surprised if I had not read more of them than any man living. A notable collection of them passed at his death to his old college ; the letters which he wrote, between 1910 and 1931, to William Hunt. Hunt was the closest of his friends ; to no other friend, I fancy, did he write so often or so intimately. Between two and three hundred of these letters I have read, bringing to them affectionate pre- possession. I have found them, even so, disappointing. When Miss Helen Waddell says that " as a letter-writer, he ranks with Walpole and with Lamb," frankly, I do not know what she means. So far at least as the correspondence which I have examined goes, not only is Saintsbury not among the great letter-writers, he is not even a good letter-writer. Here only is he dull. I add, in fairness, that all the letters I have seen are letters to men. When he wrote to women, it is likely enough that he wrote differently and better. From the time he was twenty, women were " angels " to him.
About his letters, then, I think Saintsbury was right. About the biography I am not so sure. In one of his later letters he speaks of himself as having lived so long that people have begun to be interested in him again. The interest has continued. The Memorial Volume published in 1945 was given " so warm a welcome " that the editors of it have been encouraged to gather other uncollected papers and essays.* These will surely find new friends for this most friendly of writers. Friends new and old will be moved, I think, to ask why it is that about Saintsbury himself they really know so little. To the " official " biography of the D.N.B., published only last year, they can add scraps from the three " Scrap Books." But it comes to not very much—for a life so long and, over most of its length, mixed so intimately with the happenings of contemporary literature. I can't but think that some sort of a biography was worth while ; something not too big nor too businesslike, but satis- fying obvious curiosities. I am curious to know, for example, where Saintsbury picked up his immense learning. The range of it covers Europe. Yet never was there, you might suppose, such a stay-at-home. Did he know all these languages and literatures never living or mixing with the peoples who spoke and made them ? Did he know French literature all that well, and of France and the French know nothing ? His judgements of French literature have been, at many points, challenged. Have they, in fact, the defect of being bookish judgements ? Or did he know what he was talking about, having lived with it ? I am set guessing. Not here only, but everywhere, are we up against an ultimately bookish man.
It ought not to be so. He was not always a professor. He did not, in fact, become a professor till he was fifty. Till then he might fairly be described as a failed scholar turned journalist. He has written charmingly of " the charm of journalism." But here again I should like to know a little more about him than the " Scrap Books " afford. I should like to know just how he mixed with the life of journalism. I should like to know what his employers thought of him. In the eyes of journalists was he, in fact, a. good journalist ?
When he put off the journalist and put on the professor, he was, rumour said, not too successful, at any rate initially. But here too his biographers are either silent or reticent. In general, I should like to know a good deal more about his friends. I have mentioned William Hunt. Not often has there been, I should suppose, such a friendship, such an unintermitted correspondence, between two men of mature years. But no word upon this friendship does the ' biography of either of them offer. I do not even know when, or where, the friendship began. They were at Oxford together. But there they missed one another. In both politics and religion they seem to have had common sympathies.
Of Saintsbury's politics we know perhaps enough. Here he talked freely and (I fear) foolishly. On the subject of religion he is a good deal more reticent. The first " Scrap Book " has a scrap upon the Oxford Movement. " There is no book 1 should have more liked to * George Saintsbury : A Last Vintage. (Methuen. 15s.) H. W. GARROD. write," says Saintsbury, "or should more like to have written, than a History of the Oxford Movement." The last " Scrap Book " has an article upon the Articles of Religion ; and another upon the reunion of the Churches. " As a person fairly well acquainted with history, and not quite ignorant of theology," Saintsbury " fails to discover " any benefit that could come from reunion either with Rome or with the dissenters. He was called " the Saint," already in his Oxford days ; and it was not merely his surname, I suspect, that suggested the nickname. To the end he could be flippant about religion. But if we knew more about him, we should find, I fancy, that it was the half of his life. His letters to Hunt, I notice, he dates habitually by saints' days.
If he did not want a biography of himself, it was not because he wanted to puzzle posterity. Far rather it was, as Miss Waddell says, from a real modesty. But he does, as things stand, set a puzzle. I think of him, rightly or wrongly, as not a first-class journalist, nor yet a first-class professor—what mattered to the Edinburgh students was not the professor, but the " character." As a writer, again, he can hardly be brought into the first class. He preached style. But " it was one of the many contradictions in him," says Miss Waddell, that he could " write like the scour of a river in spate, allusion tumbling after allusion, parenthesis rammed within parenthesis, reckless to reject the straws and faggots that his headlong thought swept up in its course." This " unself- consciousness " of his style Miss Waddell rather likes. But can there be a style which is unselfconscious ? All the while, of course, Saintsbury is getting at something ; something simple. He is getting at getting on with things. He has a mission. Not merely has he something to 'say, but he has everything to say. Never was there in our criticism such a polymath ; and he must out with it all. In the whole history of English writing nobody has ever written so much, unless it be, perhaps, Defoe or (in a different kind) William Adolphus Trollope. Mr. Parker's bibliography, appended usefully to A Last Vintage, tells but a small part of the story. It gives us perhaps the half of what Saintsbury wrote. It leaves out of account " the equivalent of at least a hundred volumes "—so Saintsbury himself sums " the uncollectable collection " of his casual journalism.
It is not nothing to have written more than any other English writer ; to have written all of it from a sufficient learning, some of it from a deep learning ; to have done all of it in a hurry, but pretty well ; to have been often provocative, sometimes arresting, always interesting. For the most part he writes about writers, by prefer- ence about their writings ; the men themselves seem secondary. Never did anyone believe so simply in good writing, and make you know it. Just in this lies the primary appeal of his criticism. I doubt whether he lectured well ; I am not sure that his journalism was good journalism. But he was worth listening to ; he was, and is, worth reading, for the singleness of heart which he brings to all good writing. The grand and passionate effects of style make especial appeal to him. If he is not always a good critic, he is never less than a sincere one. It is so that he succeeds, even when he is most in a hurry, in carrying with him the good will of his readers.
Of the essays gathered in this Last Vintage, none, perhaps, is specially notable. Interesting is an early contribution to the Fortnightly, Voltaire and Rousseau. The editor of the Fortnightly was Morley ; and Saintsbury is obviously on his best behaviour, shaping his sentences carefully I looked to find an earlier Fortnightly essay, that on Baudelaire. But even the bibliography omits it. The newly collected papers are prefaced by " apprecia- tions " from three of Saintsbury's friends. Dr. Nichol Smith repro- duces an address delivered at a dinner of the Saintsbury Society in 1945 ; Miss Dorothy Stuart writes on " The Last Years " of Saints- bury ; Miss Waddell upon " The Man of Books." Of all three essays I find the quality singularly engaging. The praises of the " angels " would have gratified the " Saint," I think, very specially.
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